Rod Dreher's Blog, page 79

Ryan T. Anderson Was Made For This Moment

For the last nine years, Ryan T. Anderson has been active in Washington public policy circles as a researcher at the Heritage Foundation, and as a cheerful advocate across several media for religious liberty, traditional marriage, the sanctity of life, and other socially conservative positions. He has drawn the most heat, though, for his opposition to “gender ideology,” a term that covers transgenderism and adjacent ideologies that often contradict science, and seek to impose radical social constructivism on an unwary public.

Recently, Amazon quietly quit selling his acclaimed 2018 book When Harry Became Sally: Responding To The Transgender Moment, a science-based critique of transgender ideology and the laws based on it. You can still buy Hitler’s Mein Kampf on Amazon, but you cannot buy a well-written, scientifically-informed critique of gender ideology by a leading Catholic public intellectual. This controversy arose at the same time the Democratic-controlled House has once again passed a version of the Equality Act, which would elevate sexual orientation and gender identity to the same status as race in federal civil rights law — an act that President Biden has promised to sign if it passes the Senate too.

In January, Anderson, a Princeton graduate and protegé of Prof. Robert George, was made president of the Ethics And Public Policy Center, a leading socially conservative think tank in Washington. This puts Anderson, at only 39, in a top position to advance socially conservative policy in an era when all the signs for the social and religious Right look bad. I asked Ryan, an old friend, if he would answer some questions from me via e-mail. He just sent in his responses:

RD: I was shocked, but not surprised (if you take my meaning), to see that Amazon.com has cancelled your 2018 bestseller “When Harry Became Sally.” What does this mean in the short term, and in the long term?

RTA: Short term, I’ve sold a couple thousand books in the past week—which is unheard of for a three-year-old book. Long term, it’s part of an effort to discredit me and anyone like me who is willing to speak out against the unethical (and unscientific) experiments that are being conducted on children struggling with gender dysphoria. Because I had the gall to make such arguments and report on those studies the media refuses to, Amazon, the world’s largest retailer, has removed my book on the scientific, medical, philosophical, and legal aspects of transgender issues. That’ll have a chilling impact on any future author considering whether to write on this topic or not.

But it goes beyond just this one topic. It’ll harm the entire culture of book authoring, publishing, and reading—as it will have a chilling effect on all aspects of the book market. How many authors will think twice before telling the truth controversial issues? How many publishers will simply decline to publish books they’re afraid will be barred from Amazon’s shelves? How many readers will never even hear of the banned books?

Silver lining, this could be further catalyst that’ll interrupt the libertarian slumber of many conservatives and prompt them to think critically about what, for example, the natural law says about both the justification of and limits to economic liberties. I wrote a dissertation on this, and applied a little bit of that argument in an essay last week at First Things about Amazon and other Big Tech threats.

When he was running for president, Joe Biden vowed to sign the Equality Act if elected. Now that both the House and the Senate are in the hands of Democrats, odds are that the Equality Act will pass. Why does this concern you?

First, thankfully, odds are still against the bill becoming law. If the legislative filibuster remains, the Equality Act goes nowhere in the Senate. If they somehow convince Senator Manchin to vote to remove the legislative filibuster, then we’re in a different situation. The question would then be whether Senator McConnell can keep all 50 republicans opposed (and early signs are good as Senator Collins has said she now opposes the Equality Act). That would then leave a 50-50 split with VP Harris casting the deciding vote—unless, of course, Senator Manchin broke ranks and opposed the bill.

Second, why is the Equality Act so disconcerting? My most recent short treatment can be found last week in the New York Post. But I’ve been writing about the harms of the Equality Act, and its predecessor the Employment Nondiscrimination Act, since 2013. In books, law review articles, essays, op-eds, white papers, etc. etc. my basic argument has been that it gets the nature of the human person wrong, and by enshrining a false anthropology into law it’ll cause serious harms. (Basic idea being straight from MLK, who was building on Aquinas and Augustine, that for man-made law to be just, it needs to embody the natural law and the eternal law.)

The equality act would take a just law—the Civil Rights Act of 1964—which banned discrimination on the basis of race, and then add “sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity” everywhere that race is protected. It expands the number of private businesses that would now be classified as public accommodations. And it explicitly exempts itself from the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA). And it’s important to point out that because “sex” isn’t currently a protected class in Title II (public accommodations) or Title VI (federal funding recipients), by adding “sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity” to those titles the only religious liberty protections the Equality Act allows for would be those available to racists.

So the short answer is that the Equality Act treats people and institutions that believe we are created male and female, and that male and female are created for each other, as the legal equivalent of racists. And then all of the negative consequences for privacy and safety in single-sex facilities, for equality and fairness for athletics, for medicine when it comes to gender dysphoria (and abortion, see my NYPost op-ed) follow from that. If you get human nature wrong in law, there are consequences.

Because the vast majority of those consequences are not simply about “religious liberty,” the so-called Fairness for All alternative to the Equality Act isn’t actually fair, at all. As I argued last month in the Wall Street Journal, secular girls care just as much about their privacy and safety and athletics and medicine. My most recent piece on the misnamed Fairness for All bill is a short article in the Notre Dame Journal of Legislation co-authored with Princeton professor Robert P. George.

The LGBT acronym lumps transgenderism in with homosexuality, but a vocal minority of lesbians are critical of trans rights claims. On what basis?

The short answer there is that they know that the T is radically different than the LGB. Their argument is that the Equality Act erases actual women as a legal category. Their argument is that a lot of gender ideology is based on the very stereotypes that they’ve been combatting. Don’t take it from me, though, watch the two events I organized and hosted at Heritage (back when I worked there) where these courageous women (not all of whom are lesbians, by the way) spoke for themselves.

https://www.heritage.org/event/the-inequality-the-equality-act-concerns-the-left

https://www.heritage.org/marriage-and-family/event/biology-isnt-bigotry-why-sex-matters-the-age-gender-identity

Anecdotally, when I talk to ordinary people about the Equality Act, they are shocked by what it would require. The media, in my estimation, are once again doing advocacy journalism instead of fairly reporting on the issue. Am I wrong?

You’re not wrong at all. The media is carrying water for the Left on this. But there’s a deeper problem. Most people haven’t thought two seconds about the T in LGBT, nor have they thought about what counts as “discrimination” for the LGBT activists.

What I mean by this is that most everyone agrees that a hospital shouldn’t refuse to treat someone for Covid because they identify as LGBT. But, thank God, that doesn’t seem to have actually ever happened. Still when people hear about a law that bans LGBT discrimination, that’s what they have in mind. They don’t realize what it means for sex-reassignment procedures in general, let alone what it means for children with gender dysphoria in particular. So activists pull on people’s heartstrings by saying we need a law banning truly unjust discrimination (which is virtually non-existent) and then that law isn’t nuanced and measured, but a radical bill imposing a radical ideology. A law that is sold as a shield protecting vulnerable minorities ends up being a sword to persecute people who don’t embrace a new sexual orthodoxy.

Likewise, I think a lot of people—including politicians—have said to themselves “I’m an ally,” “I support gay marriage,” therefore….I now support the Equality Act and transgender rights. They haven’t given it any thought at all—which is a terrible disservice to people who need real healing for their gender dysphoria, and a disservice to women when men who identify as women would have to be treated as women under civil rights law.

It’s not just the media, though. Over the weekend, I had lunch with a friend who just graduated from seminary within a conservative denomination. He did graduate work on gender ideology, and told me that pro-trans activists within his denomination are making headway because so few of its pastors and other thought leaders understand the nature of the challenge. You’re a serious Catholic; what are American church leaders failing to get?

It’s a lack of courage. And a naïve hope that if we just ignore the transgender issue the ideology won’t spread here, and the activists won’t harass us, and the law won’t get us. But that’s wrong. I think many religious leaders feel like they put their necks on the line on the marriage issue, and it didn’t make a difference, and it came at a cost, so why should they do anything here. So there’s a theological, vocational mistake in terms of what the Church is supposed to do in bearing witness to the truth. There’s also a pastoral mistake in terms of the formation that pastors need to be providing to their own flocks. And there’s a legal mistake in terms of a failure to engage as good citizens in the shaping of our laws.

You’ve moved in Washington policy circles for a long time. Why have Republican politicians made such a hash of standing up for religious liberty in the face of LGBT politics? For that matter, why is it so hard for them to find their voice to defend women-only spaces? Is it really risky to stand up for girls’ athletics?

Same answer as above: lack of courage. But also a political error of listening to political strategists who simply are out of touch with the American people. But there are notable exceptions, see what my friend Chip Roy did last week, or what Senators Rubio, Lee, Hawley and Braun did.

You recently took over leadership of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, one of Washington’s top think tanks. How has the political and policy landscape changed for religious and social conservatives since you’ve been in Washington?

I don’t think I could overstate how quickly one of the major political parties explicitly positioned itself as hostile to orthodox biblical faith—think things like the HHS mandate, Catholic adoption agencies, and Beto O’Rourke saying the quiet part out loud on non-profit tax status—while the other major political party is so afraid to and inarticulate in defending its own base. My sense is that any organization that isn’t explicitly socially conservative will either go silent or actively become hostile in the coming years.

How should religious and social conservative activists change their tactics and their strategy in this new environment?

First, don’t be taken for granted. Back in 2017 I shared this scatterplot on Twitter.

Almost no “fiscally conservative, socially liberal” voters. But sure, build your electoral strategy that way… @WSJopinion @fbuckley pic.twitter.com/2yD9jpoUJf

— Ryan T. Anderson (@RyanTAnd) August 10, 2017

The electoral reality is that the GOP can’t win without social conservative voters. Make them work for that support. Which means second, we need an NRA for social conservatives. We need political organizations that will take scalps of elected officials who betray us and reward and protect our heroes. When the left took Rick Santorum’s scalp, it sent a loud and clear message to all of his colleagues. We still haven’t developed the political infrastructure to support people like him.

Big business will make it painful for an elected official to do the right thing on social issues. Social conservatives need 501(c)(4)s, PACs and super PACs, 527s, and other organizations to engage in direct political action, supporting bills and politicians that are good for religious liberty and human sexuality — and opposing those that do them harm. What the Susan B. Anthony List has done for the pro-life cause should be done for religious liberty and human sexuality. There’s a Club for Growth, but no Club for Virtue. The NRA can whip members into voting to protect gun rights, but no NRA for families. When it comes to human sexuality and religious liberty, we merely ask members to do the right thing because it’s the right thing. We don’t make it painful to do the wrong thing.

If you had the opportunity to speak in churches across America, talking to conservative congregations that don’t pay close attention to the political environment, or moral controversies at the national level, what would you tell them about the road ahead? What should they be seeing, thinking, and doing differently?

I’d tell them to read Carl Trueman’s new and excellent book [The Rise And Triumph Of The Modern Self]. And I’d encourage them to develop a curriculum of readings and lectures to combat the rise of therapeutic expressive individualism within their own flock. Don’t see the challenge as something “out there,” but realize it has already entered your church and is influencing the moral imaginations of your own people. I’d tell them to be intentional about formation, and intentional about community. I’d tell them to be intentional about families, and developing programs to assist parents in forming their kids. One hour, one day a week for Sunday school isn’t going to cut it anymore—in fact, in never did. And then I’d encourage them to equip themselves on the Theology of the Body, and a philosophy of the body, and a psychology of the body, and a sociology of the body.

Bad philosophy needs to be answered by good philosophy. Bad science needs to be responded to with good science—this is true with the biological science of embryology and the social science of marriage and the psychological science of gender identity. Pastors can’t allow their own people to think of these debates as ones that pit faith against reason, that force a choice between backward superstition against enlightened science.

And then I’d encourage active citizenship by engaging in the political process at all levels.

Readers, if you would like to hear Anderson’s basic presentation about the challenges of transgender ideology, here is an hourlong lecture he gave about it in 2017. And please buy “When Harry Became Sally” — it’s a well-researched, compellingly argued book, one that Amazon.com doesn’t want you to read.

 

 

UPDATE.2: Some readers aren’t able to see the Anderson lecture on their browser. If not, here’s a different version of the same event.

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Covid & The Rise Of Small, Livable Cities

This showed up in my Twitter feed this week:

An interesting question, one I’ve been living for about a decade, in fact.

In the summer of 2011, when I was hired by The American Conservative, I was living in Philadelphia. The idea was that after a year or two, I would move with my family down to the Washington area. Then that autumn, my sister Ruthie died, and my wife and I felt that we should be living in the small town of St. Francisville, La., my hometown, to look after my aging parents and to help with my sister’s kids. Wick Allison, who ran the magazine (and who died last year, RIP), generously agreed to let me do this, trusting that geographical distance would be no problem for me, given the kind of work I do.

And that was the birth of what I used to call the St. Francisville bureau of TAC, which became the Baton Rouge bureau in 2016, after my father died and our mission parish had to close; we moved 30 miles down the road to be nearer the closest Orthodox church. So, I live in a smallish city — about 400,000 — in the Deep South, and write this blog, do podcast interviews, and write books — three New York Times bestsellers since I relocated here. The cost of living is low compared to East Coast cities, and the airport is very easy to use (and the New Orleans airport, which is much bigger, is only about an hour to the South). Louisiana is not for everybody. It’s hot most of the year, and very humid. There are snakes. But you can’t beat the people. It works for us.

Covid forced the whole country to realize how much of the work that we do can be done remotely. It ought to be compelling young people and especially young marrieds to think about the possibilities of relocating to smaller cities where you can still find the good life, but on a friendlier budget. It seems especially true that conservative Christians of the Benedict Option persuasion who are going to be working remotely even after Covid passes should reconsider the feasibility of relocating in larger numbers to more friendly redoubts.

There’s no doubt that you give up a lot when you leave a big city. I would say the happiest time of my life was living in New York City from 1998 to 2003. But my wife and I always knew that if we were going to have the big family we wanted, we were going to have to leave one day. It’s just too expensive for the kind of life we wanted for our family, and it’s too intense. Having kids takes a lot out of you, and trying to navigate with children around New York City is a real challenge. People do it, but it’s hard. When we moved to Dallas in 2003, man, I have rarely seen my wife more joyful than being able to put groceries in the back of a minivan instead of having to push a stroller home through the snow, with plastic sacks of groceries hanging off of it.

Still, depending on where you move to, you are going to give up the same kind of nightlife, a rich restaurant culture, art house movie theaters, and all the little things that make big cities so alluring. You’re going to have to give up the kinds of fun things that can really only happen when you have a big concentration of people in one geographic space. The thing that’s hard to see when you live in a big city, and love it, is the things you get to compensate for not living there. Life is just a lot more relaxed elsewhere (and not only because you don’t have to think about money all the time). This really, really matters when you start having kids.

My wife and I found that the Internet makes life easier for people like us, who like big cities. You can get anything you want on video-on-demand now, obviating the need for art house movie theaters and well-stocked DVD stores (‘memba them?). You can get any cooking spices you need online now — even NYC’s legendary Kalustyan’s will send things right to your door in a trice. Even better, the kinds of culinary changes that have come over America in the past twenty to thirty years means that you might have a good fresh spice store right in your city (we do). It’s a lot easier now to get good coffee, good beer, and good bread in many more places — without having to pay big city rents.

A down side, I have found, is that it is very hard to be social if you’re working from home a lot. My wife has a very different social life than I do, and by “very different,” I mean that she has one. I don’t. She socializes with the teachers she knows from work at the school. I socialize with … almost nobody. It’s kind of my fault — as I’ve gotten older, I’ve gotten more hermit-like — but mostly, I think, it’s because that aside from church, there are no routines that get me out of my own bubble and out of the house on a regular basis. I had not realized until I started working this way what a powerful force entropy was on me. Again, I’m not blaming the city where I live; I blame myself. I’m normally quite social, but I had not realized until moving down here how much of my socializing depended on habits of leaving the house compelled by my work. I really do miss workplace culture, but based on the kinds of things I hear from people still in it, I doubt it would be worth re-entering an arena where one false move, or one innocent move taken as hostile by the right person, could end my career and ruin my reputation.

My point is, if you do move to a smaller city and work from home, you will need to take a lot more initiative in getting out of the house and making friends. To be honest, though, this would me a problem for me if I was working from a condo in downtown Philly too.

What about the rest of you? What are you finding? Has the past year put you to thinking about moving to a smaller, more livable city? What holds you back? Did you make the move, and regret it? Or was it right for your family? Let’s start a thread.

 

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The Woke, No-Trust Society

A reader writes:

I read your piece on the Donald McNeil incident, and was reminded strongly of an accusation I got hit with in 2018.I had judged and coached high school policy debate in [major city], as a volunteer, for about 5 years. A few years previously, I had won the league’s “adjudicator of the year” award. I was also known to be one of only 2-3 coaches or judges in the entire league who was politically on the right.In fall 2018, I got a phone call from the league director saying that he had received some serious complaints about me concerning two rounds I had judged the previous year. The first accusation was that I had told black students that racism wasn’t so bad and compared their life to slavery; the second was that in an elimination round, I had said that illegal immigrants weren’t human.The first accusation had a hint of truth, but like the accusation against McNeil that he mentioned the “white man’s burden,” it was primarily an indication of the students’ ignorance. In the round, where one team had been arguing that America was irredeemably racist (policy debaters adopted radical CRT long before Coates and Kendi stepped on stage), one of the students said, “things have never been as bad for black people in America as they are today!” After the round–and I think I actually gave that team the win–I pointed out that this was obviously false and hyperbolic. Clearly, these kids were much better off even in Chicago’s worst inner-city schools than they would have been as slaves in Georgia two centuries ago. I also explained that absurd hyperbole was a common problem in debate, and shared my own high school story where I had said something similarly silly and got called out on it by the judge.The second accusation was complete nonsense; I support generally open borders, never would have said anything like that, and since it supposedly happened in an elimination round, there would have been a room full of witnesses.Fortunately, the league director knew me well, dropped the issue, and only suggested that in the future I not personalize the criticism from the first case.A few months later, we adopted a newborn son and I got a new, more time-consuming job, so I stopped volunteering. But this year, the topic was criminal law, and since I am a lawyer, I thought about going back and helping. Until the summer riots began, that is. Because in late 2020-2021, an accusation like that wouldn’t have remained confined to a sane investigation, and would have the potential to wreck my career. I’m not going to take that risk for free. Too bad for the kids, who are going to have a tough time teaching themselves legal policy issues, but that’s the result the institution of high school debate has achieved.Our schools teach teenagers that they have the right to be safe from any challenging thought, they should go to the authorities with any complaint, and that they should not respect any wisdom that comes from experience or age. The nation has raised a generation of totalitarians by ceding the universities, then the education schools, and then the public schools, to the totalitarian left. If you have a career you value, don’t volunteer to teach or coach teenagers.

Wokeness is shredding the social fabric, because now people don’t know who can be trusted. Don McNeil went to Peru as a favor to a friend. He was making the princely sum of $300 a day to be an expert for a group of prep school kids. And they destroyed his career.I wouldn’t do anything like that, or like what this reader mentioned. I would be hesitant to take any kind of leadership role in any public organization, for fear of this kind of thing. I’m watching the wokeness situation in the US military, because my middle son wants to go into the military, and I would like to support him, but I do not want him in a situation in which he will has to affirm things that are not true as a condition of his service.In Donald McNeil’s case, the truth or falsity of the allegations did not matter to his persecutors — nor did they matter to the Times. If the accusation is a sin against wokeness, you’re in trouble. You can be ruined for life, despite being innocent.When I was in Hungary, one of my sources for my book told me that they’ve gotten thirty years past the fall of Communism, but the people still haven’t recovered from the deep wound of having to view everyone around you with fear and suspicion, as a requirement of self-protection. That’s what Communism meant for the Soviet bloc. Wokeness is getting us to the same place.

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War On Christian Orthodoxy Never Ends

You might have seen that Bethany Christian Services, the big Evangelical adoption agency, has changed its policy, and will now adopt kids out to gay couples.

It is not clear to what extent this was a response to the clear political tide nationally that would not let adoption agencies that would not work with gay couples do business, and to what extent this represents a change of heart at Bethany. Either way, it’s a capitulation. Whatever your own personal view is on gay adoptions, the fact that this major Evangelical agency has surrendered its position is a big deal.

Al Mohler is on fire about all this in his Briefing this morning. Excerpts:

This is exactly the pivot that is demanded of us. The world is now demanding, the moral revolutionaries are now demanding that every single individual in this society, every single institution, every single school, every single religious denomination, every single adoption and foster care agency must pivot. And the pivot, in this case, means capitulation.

It means absolute surrender to the demands of the LGBTQ community, and now we’re just talking about, generalized, the political left in the United States. We’ve been looking at this coming for some time, talking about the Equality Act. In recent days, I’ve been talking about how we are looking at the society consolidate its energies of coercion in order to serve the cause of the moral revolutionaries. That’s the way a moral revolution works. Eventually the government, all the major sectors of society join in an effort to coerce the new moral understanding.

And in this case, what we have seen is a head-on collision, not just in general between the newly invented sexual liberties and religious liberty, we are now seeing a head-on collision between organizations like Bethany Christian Services that have been very committed to a Christian understanding of marriage and the family and human sexuality and gender.

More:

Bethany Christian Services surrendered even before the war been fought. Nate Bolt, identified as Bethany’s Senior Vice President of Public and Government Affairs, told Religion News Service, “This decision implements consistent inclusive practices for LGBTQ families across our organizations.” He went on to say, “We’ve had a patchwork approach for the last few years.”

In other words, there’ve been some places where Bethany’s already decided to expand to including same-sex couples, LGBTQ identified couples, but there’ve been other areas in which that has not yet been the case. This nationalizes and standardizes the entire policy, but you’ll notice the kind of language that’s being used here. It is used in the language of implementing “consistent inclusive practices.”

Now, those are intended to be very positive words, but let’s just consider the fact that when you’re looking at inclusive here and consistent, this means a consistent capitulation to the moral revolutionaries, a consistent abdication of any institutional identity that is connected with Christian conviction or biblical teaching concerning the very nature of what it means to be male and female, the very nature of marriage.

And remember this, these Christian organizations were put in place by Christians on Christian commitment because we genuinely believe that a child deserves a mother and a father. We genuinely believe that marriage can only be the union of a man and a woman. These are not just positioned statements that the Christian church has decided to adopt. We believe, and you can check the Bible for yourself, this is biblical Christianity. This is demanded of us.

Bringing it home:

This has not been a doctrinal disagreement. The New York Times is unquestionably right in saying that Bethany Christian Services is here trying to achieve something of a tight rope act. But here’s where Christians need to understand that this is not just about looking at one institution’s pivot or capitulation on this issue. It’s understanding the pressure that is brought on and be brought on every single Christian, every single Christian congregation, every single denomination, every single Christian institution or ministry period.

And the demand is going to come just what the argument that you see here, “Serving children,” one person connected with the organization said, “shouldn’t be controversial.” No. Serving children shouldn’t be controversial. But then again, it is when you have to ask the question into what kind of family can Christians support children being placed?

Eventually you have to answer that question and it does come down to whether or not you believe that the Bible offers what is not only a doctrinally binding definition, but what is actually good for, even necessary for, the human family to flourish. But this is exactly the kind of arguments going to come, helping people means that you need to help more people, even if that means forfeiting your Christian convictions, even about what it means to help people.

It means that if you have a homeless shelter, you can help more homeless people if you will abandon your Christian convictions and no longer maintain any commitment to a biblical standard of morality. That might lead a state or local government to say, “We won’t partner with you if you hold those convictions.” So abandon the convictions in the name of helping people. Expand this to Christian higher education.

Think of how many more students you could teach and how many more people you could reach within your institution and, by the way, charge for tuition, if you abandon your Christian convictions in the name of just teaching more people. Yes, you can understand the argument that’s being made here, but we need to recognize that what it is is a recipe for the absolute dissolution of Christianity in the United States in terms of any real witness, not only in the public square, but frankly, even within our own ministries.

But all of this in the context we face right now, with the threat of the Equality Act now politically hanging over us in an imminent way, considering the forces of coercion from higher academia, from Hollywood, from just about every sector coming in on us, and understand that the pressure to pivot is going to just increase exponentially nearly with every passing hour or day or week or month.

And eventually every single Christian, every single Christian ministry, every Christian school organization, college, university, every denomination and congregation is going to have to make a decision about what we will do when that ultimate demand for a pivot point comes. We have to decide if we will pivot or not. And at this point, I simply want to quote scripture and a scripture that’s familiar with you. As for me in my house, we will serve the Lord.

Read it all. Mohler also takes on how the White House is changing language, and he points to how changing the language is key to changing the culture. This is a point I make clear in Live Not By Lies. I know that some of y’all get tired of me banging the gong for that book and for The Benedict Option, but it fires me up that I’ve been warning my fellow Christians for years now that this was all coming, and still, a lot of them prefer to live in denial. Don’t listen to me then, listen to Al Mohler! He’s telling you that there is no escaping this, no getting away from having to make the decision. If you are not preparing yourself and the communities for which you are responsible to make the decision consistent with the truth as God has revealed to us, then if the community capitulates, as Bethany has done, and tries to rationalize its unfaithfulness, the fault will belong in part to you.

The time for churches and Christian organizations to talk about this is now, before they are put on the spot. That day is coming. For all those who never read The Benedict Option, but are sure that it says we can escape all this by heading to the hills — now is the time to read the book, for reals. It’s not about escape — in the first chapter, I quote Ephraim Radner saying there is no escape — but about building resilient communities that do not capitulate, despite the world’s hatred. Live Not By Lies is about the same thing, though more urgent, and written from the point of view of Christians who have had to live under anti-Christian totalitarianism.

In my Schmemann Lecture in January, I told Orthodox seminarians that it was their generation that was going to prepare the church in America to live under soft totalitarianism. The Orthodox Left in this country — centered around the Fordham Orthodox program, and related journals — raised hell about my being invited to give the lecture. They claim that I’m bring culture war to Orthodoxy. No, the truth is that I’m preparing Orthodox seminarians and laity for the culture war that is coming to them, whether they want it or not. A number of progressive Orthodox scholars and fellow travelers are trying to prepare the church for capitulation to the spirit of the age. I understand why they hate to be told what they are doing, but there it is. This has happened so many times in church institutions that it is the most predictable thing in the world.

But here is something new and extraordinary. The Anglican Church in North America (ACNA) is a breakaway denomination composed of conservative ex-Episcopalians who refused to capitulate to the Episcopal Church’s demands that they affirm homosexuality. Many ACNA clerics and laity lost a lot — friends, church properties — to remain faithful to Christian teaching. They have affiliated with the Anglican churches in Africa. I have some friends who are in the ACNA, and I know that the church is home to some very solid Christians. You would think that having severed themselves from TEC over the issue of homosexuality, that it would be easy for ACNA to hold the Biblical line.

You would be wrong. Incredibly, now the ACNA is facing an internal fight over its fidelity to Biblical teaching on homosexuality. A reader sends this link, which gathers various news sources explaining the controversy. 

It began with this statement from the ACNA bishops reaffirming the church’s commitment to Biblical teaching, and offering direction on use of the term “gay Christian,” and the use of language. I have tended to see the use of the term “gay Christian” as non-problematic, in that it describes a Christian who struggles with same-sex attraction. But the ACNA statement made me question my own use of that language; they make it clearer than it previously had been to me how the issue of language use in this case is not benign.

One of the ACNA bishops, Todd Hunter, does not agree, and issued his own rival pastoral guidance. (N.B., that same bishop also issued a guidance praising Critical Race Theory, and saying it is useful for churches.) This was publicly endorsed by a gay man who seeks ordination to the ACNA priesthood, as well as some seminary professors at Trinity School of Ministry (an ACNA seminary) as well as some ACNA priests — all signatories to the “Dear Gay Anglican” letter. Then the powerhouse Anglican Church of Nigeria heard about it, and sent a clear shot across ACNA’s bow, telling them they had better not turn into The Episcopal Church. Archbishop Foley Beach, the presiding ACNA hierarch, counsels charity towards ACNA dissenters, but says that the ACNA bishops are not going to back down. 

An ACNA laywoman writes about this new controversy from the point of view of someone traumatized by the great divorce between people like her and the Episcopal Church. Excerpt:

Many of us have experienced assaults upon our personhood from every direction. Newspaper articles covering congregational splits animated angry and sometimes unstable individuals to harass church members. Some of us know what it is like to have our church playgrounds vandalized, or to have strangers hiding in the bushes outside our churches, hurling epithets at churchgoers that should not be repeated in print.

We have experienced sustained attacks upon our character as Christians. We were consistently – and contradictorily – referred to as “citizens of Sodom and Gomorrah” and “apostates,” as well as “homophobes” and “bigots.” These labels didn’t come from the world – they came from the church and from the people with whom we once shared a pew.

What many of us, displaced and dejected, experienced was a spiritual trauma which few other Christians can comprehend. For many of us, our trust in the church, in our spiritual leaders, and in our fellow Christians was shattered.

Ultimately, our individual journeys led us to the ACNA, a province which promised to be a sanctuary for orthodox Episcopalians.

But, once trust is broken, it is not easily rebuilt.

Why we matter.

Not only have we poured our time, energy, and hearts into our churches, but many of us are the founding members who followed our priests and bishops away from the Episcopal Church because we trusted our spiritual leaders. Some of our Episcopal Churches hosted African missionaries who helped pave the way for a new Anglican province to be established in the United States. To our leaders- we have put our trust in you and in the ACNA.

We have the real life experiences which enable us to know when a duck is a duck. We remember the language used in the past that sowed seeds of division and created distrust. As such, we believe that any “in your face” undermining of the guidance issued by the College of Bishops is never benign, but can have long-term consequences.

And once trust is broken, it is not easily rebuilt.

What we hear. What we see.

When we see the words “gay Christian” replaced by “gay Anglican” – an Anglican is a Christian – we see an act of rebellion against the pastoral guidance of our College of Bishops who have been given the authority of the apostles through apostolic succession.

Such acts of rebellion cause us to re-live the trauma of the past, and cause us to re-grieve the loss of the Episcopal Church, our fellowship communities, and our friendships. This pain has only been compounded by some of the online discussions resulting from the letter, with opponents sometimes being unjustly characterized as “homophobic.” That is not who we are. It was not true in TEC and it is not true now.

When we see the words “gay Anglican,” we see an attempt to re-enslave those who have been liberated by Jesus Christ from their dead self, which has already been buried with Christ. Rather than promote the reality of our newly created selves, it appears to be an effort to cling to our corpses.

We recognize that our churches are filled with broken people. We refute any suggestion that marriage or friendship or any other relationship established in this world will remove the loneliness within us. But our God knows our pain, and our hope is in Christ, with whom we will be reunited and receive crowns of glory.

When we witness opposition to the Dear Gay Anglicans letter reframed as, “This idea that arguing for a pastoral presence with gay people in the church is the exact same thing as marrying them is absurd,” we experience Déjà vu. We already lived through this type of dishonest, reframing of dissent, and the twisting of statements, in TEC.

When we are assured by the proponents of the Dear Gay Anglicans letter that we have nothing to worry about, we experience Déjà vu. How many times did we hear that in the TEC? Too numerous to count. We do not place blind faith in any mortal, but in our Living God – in Him alone.

When we see that the author of the Dear Gay Anglicans letter is publicly (on Facebook) categorizing “bishops and priests” as “DEFINITELY unsafe,” appearingly on the basis of support or disapproval of the language used in the letter, we see (1) ourselves, yet again, being falsely labeled, (2) the apostolic authority of the College of Bishops being unrecognized, and (3) a province in tumult. Will the ACNA also become labeled as TEC and cease to attract orthodox Christians? We pray not.

With the realization that the divisive rhetoric prevalent in TEC has now entered the ACNA, we are left with the effects of re-traumatization. Already struggling with trust issues from our spiritual experiences, we wonder, will we – orthodox Christians – become unwelcome in the ACNA, too? The truth is that we have already had one province forsake us. Will the ACNA forsake orthodox Anglicans too? We admit to these concerns and commit ourselves to prayer for our beloved province.

Once trust is broken, it is not easily rebuilt.

Read it all. 

I welcome commentary and insight from readers who are in the ACNA. I bring the situation up here in connection to Bethany’s capitulation to wake everybody in the small-o orthodox churches, and adjacent institutions, to this fact: this issue will not leave you alone. Not even in your own breakaway church. You will not be able to elide the issue, except by lying to yourself about what you are doing. If you choose fidelity and orthodoxy — if you choose Truth — you will be made to suffer. There is no avoiding it. Prepare. 

UPDATE: Reader bmj says:

[The reader asked me to remove his comment.]

UPDATE.2: An ACNA cleric e-mails to say that in this internal controversy

all parties agree that the practice of homosexuality is sin, are against same-sex marriage, and teach sexual purity outside and inside of marriage.  This core issue is our identity — is it in our sexuality or is it in Christ?

An ACNA layman writes:

I’m ACNA and have been following this controversy some. I think five years ago my attitude was that ACNA had already gone through the sexual perversion test by virtue of separating from TEC. We have already made our position clear. No liberal is going to join us. And if any of us becomes liberal, why they can just go to the TEC! Why would a liberal stay in the ACNA doing it the orthodox way when they can go down the street or across town and do it they way they would prefer at an Episcopal church? It isn’t unheard of for a Christian to fall into atheism. When they do, they usually leave the church, they don’t go on a crusade to make the church atheistic!My mistake was thinking that the motivation here for the liberals was the desire to have a space where things can be done their way. The psychology of today’s progressives is more that of a colonizer. Why fight an uphill battle to conquer this traditional church instead of simply going to a liberal one that already meets your standards? The answer I think is Sir Edmund Hillary’s: “because it’s there!”. So long as there is wilderness untamed by wokeness, progressive colonizers are going to be drawn to it so they can tame and domesticate it. It is Manifest Destiny and they will not rest until they have colonized everything.

UPDATE.3: An ACNA priest writes:

I was just on the phone with the COO of ACNA today, and this has been a big mess, and I hate to see this particular sort of misunderstanding proliferated. There is literally *no one* in ACNA wanting to change the church’s prohibition on same-sex practice. If anyone in the clergy (or even laity) were doing that, they would be disciplined.”He also said,”Everyone involved, including Pieter Valk, the “gay man seeking ordination” is committed to the teaching of the Jerusalem Declaration, which is foundational to GAFCON and states:“We acknowledge God’s creation of humankind as male and female and the unchangeable standard of Christian marriage between one man and one woman as the proper place for sexual intimacy and the basis of the family. We repent of our failures to maintain this standard and call for a renewed commitment to lifelong fidelity in marriage and abstinence for those who are not married.”Pieter Valk is himself committed to celibacy and the church’s prohibition on same-sex relationships.

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Blacklists In The Woke Workplace

A pastor I know forwarded me this e-mail from someone he knows. I’ve taken identifying details out:

I applied to [a top STEM university] last week. My qualification garnered an immediate response from the [specific] department. But all was halted when they discovered that I did not write a “Diversity” statement. I was stymied as to what that was. I did a little research and found that it is basically an apology for being a white male. I wrote a page worth of equality and being fearfully and wonderfully made, and judge not by the color of their skin. It worked until the actual interview. The entire interview was based on my “racism.”

Nothing about my accomplishments in life. My lack of being woke. Not how would you teach or manage. … I truly doubt I will hear anything further from [this university].

I also spoke with [a physician who teaches at a medical school] and she … made mention of the impact the “diversity” statements are having at [her university]. Her comment was that “they are doing just what they are accusing us of.”

Here we see an example of the pre-totalitarian valuing of loyalty — in this case, to diversity ideology — over competence. In Live Not By Lies, I quote Arendt thus:

“Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intellect and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.”

This university — trust me, if you’re an engineering student, you’d be honored to have this school on your CV — was so excited about this man’s application that it reached out to him. But when he did not say the correct woke things in the interview, which interrogated him about his supposed racism, that was the end of that.

This is the new America. This is soft totalitarianism. He’s not being thrown into prison by the secret police, but he’s not able to get a job in his field, despite his qualifications, because the institution judges him to be ideologically unsound. This particular university is a public one. You think he’s not going to face the same at other universities, both public and private?

And most liberals support this stuff, and except for a brave few, those who don’t are too intimidated to speak out against it.

Here’s another one. The letter is too detailed for me to reprint it here, even with redactions. To summarize, the author is a practicing conservative Protestant who is in leadership at his Midwestern church. He also is a Realtor by trade.

A week ago, the broker/owner of his office called to ask his opinion about starting a new Multiple Listing Service in their local area. Why? The National Association of Realtors has a new ethics code that punishes Realtors for any hate speech or discrimination, not only on the job, but 24 hours, seven days a week. Well, the author of the letter attends a church that publicly dissents from the pro-LGBT line the NAR demands.

The guy’s boss is trying to help him out, but it’s going to be hard, maybe impossible. And if the Realtor is not a member of the National Association of Realtors, it dramatically affects his ability to do his job. The Realtor does not see how he can both affirm the NAR Code Of Ethics and his Church’s constitution, which he has also sworn to uphold.Here is a churchgoing man who might have to surrender his livelihood rather than affirm what he believes is a lie.And why? It’s one thing for the NAR to hold its agents to a certain standard in the workplace, but by what right do they have the right to tell those agents what they can do and say in the privacy of their own homes, and in their churches on Sunday morning? Law professor Eugene Volokh says:

The Realtors are a private organization, so this isn’t a First Amendment violation, just as blacklisting of supposedly “un-American” employees in the 1950s wasn’t a First Amendment violation. But it strikes me as potentially quite dangerous, especially given that National Association of Realtors membership appears to be quite important professionally to real estate agents; apparently,

in many parts of the country, NAR membership is required to gain access to the Multiple Listing Service, a searchable online database that sorts available real estate properties by parameters such as square footage, acreage, architectural style and much more. “If I were to lose access to that it would potentially devastate my ability to perform my career duties,” a Realtor commented on NAR’s Facebook page.

One way of thinking about this would be to ask what we’d think of this policy:

REALTORS® must not use speech supportive of unlawful violence, arson, or destruction of property, whether targeting political leaders, police officers, businesses, political organizations, or others.

Would we think that it’s good that private professional organizations are suppressing such speech, on the theory that such speech codes can help give people confidence that the professionals they’re dealing with support law and order? Or would we think that, even if most calls for unlawful violence are improper, there shouldn’t be professional blacklists of people based on their ideological views?

Yeah, they’re McCarthyites, but they’re McCarthyites for the Left, so it’s okay by our media. /sarc

It is incredible to me that this hasn’t raised the roof nationwide. We know what kind of people want to manage your every thought: totalitarians. The fact that this totalitarian prospect of the company owning your soul has not prompted an outcry tells you how far gone we are down a bad road we already are. A group of conservative, religious Realtors better lawyer up and sue.

You’ll recall the point I made about Amazon’s recent decision to start cancelling books it finds politically problematic (like Ryan T. Anderson’s book critical of gender ideology): that the real threat here is not just to Anderson’s ability to sell books, but, given Amazon’s massive power in book retailing, the threat is to the ability of any books on that one’s theme being published. Amazon cancelled Anderson’s, but has not (yet) cancelled a similar one by Abigail Shrier. Why not? Who knows? The thing is, shoot one author, teach a hundred publishers. How likely are you, as a publisher, to consider now publishing a book critical of gender ideology? Sure, Abigail Shrier has sold a massive number of them, so it would appear that there is a market for them. And she hasn’t been cancelled yet. But now that we know that Amazon will cancel these kinds of books, no matter how professionally written, and it will do so without feeling the obligation to alert publishers and writers, and without feeling required to offer an explanation. Therefore, it’s a real risk for a publisher to take a chance on a book that might out of nowhere be yanked from the shelves of America’s largest bookseller by far. If Amazon won’t sell it, it won’t likely be printed.

Given that, given what the NAR is doing, and given what universities are doing, it is long past time for conservatives to settle for a laissez-faire attitude towards running businesses, at least businesses of a certain size. Take universities out of it for a second. Both Amazon and the NAR are private organizations that have the right to govern themselves. A government powerful enough to tell Amazon that it must sell a certain title is powerful enough to tell a Christian bookseller that he has to sell The Satanic Bible. Technically, you don’t have to be a member of the NAR to sell real estate, but practically you do. In both cases, real life doesn’t match real-world power.

Why not let’s start unions? you might say. OK, but notice that the Newspaper Guild didn’t do Donald McNeil Jr. much good when he got on the wrong side of the Woke at The New York Times.

If we don’t get some major reforms in labor law, this woke blacklist is going to find its expression across institutions. Unless you are running a religious, political, or in some other sense an institution driven by a specific mission, why should you enjoy broad rights to hire or fire people based on their willingness to affirm an ethics creed that has little to nothing to do with their ability to do their jobs? Again: why the totalitarian urge? Why on earth does the National Association of Realtors care if on Sunday morning, one of its members gives a church school lesson on what the Bible has to say about human sexuality, and expresses Wrong Thoughts?

Next time, I want to see the Republican Party led by somebody who doesn’t just tweet and give incendiary speeches, but who also has the focus, competence, and determination to use state power to protect people like the church elder who only wants to make a living doing what he’s always done: sell houses.

 

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Donald McNeil Tells His Side

From about 2002, when the Catholic Church’s sex abuse scandal broke, until around the end of that decade, the experience of reading the newspaper was to risk yet another reminder that no, even now we haven’t seen the totality of this institution’s corruption.

I feel that way about each new advance in the New York Times scandal: the destruction of the newspaper’s standards at the hands of Wokeness. Today’s four-part Medium account of Donald G. McNeil’s forced resignation, as told by Donald G. McNeil, is one of those days.

McNeil withheld publication until after his last official day at the Times. It’s safe to say that after today, he will not be welcome in that building. The portrait he paints of the Times is a familiar one — that the newsroom has been taken over by woke militants, and the paper’s senior leadership, like dissenters, are terrified of them — but the detail McNeil gives about the events that ended his career makes publisher A.G. Sulzberger and editor-in-chief Dean Baquet look even more gutless.

Here’s Part One, which introduces the issue. 

Here’s Part Two: what happened on January 28, when McNeil, the Times’s lead Covid writer and a journalist of 40 years’ experience at the paper, received an e-mail from a Daily Beast reporter informing him they were going to do a story about him and the Times-sponsored Peru trip he took, accompanying a group of rich prep school kids (none black).

From that section, McNeil says this is the draft of the responses he made to the Beast reporter’s questions, but that the Times would not let him send:

1. Yes, I did use the word, in this context: A student asked me if I thought her high school’s administration was right to suspend a classmate of hers for using the word in a video she’d made in eighth grade. I said “Did she actually call someone a “(offending word”? Or was she singing a rap song or quoting a book title or something?” When the student explained that it was the student, who was white and Jewish, sitting with a black friend and the two were jokingly insulting each other by calling each other offensive names for a black person and a Jew, I said “She was suspended for that? Two years later? No, I don’t think suspension was warranted. Somebody should have talked to her, but any school administrator should know that 12-year-olds say dumb things. It’s part of growing up.”

2. I was never asked if I believed in white privilege. As someone who lived in South Africa in the 1990’s and has reported in Africa almost every year since, I have a clearer idea than most Americans of white privilege. I was asked if I believed in systemic racism. I answered words to the effect of: “Yeah, of course, but tell me which system we’re talking about. The U.S. military? The L.A.P.D.? The New York Times? They’re all different.”

3. The question about blackface was part of a discussion of cultural appropriation. The students felt that it was never, ever appropriate for any white person to adopt anything from another culture — not clothes, not music, not anything. I counter-argued that all cultures grow by adopting from others. I gave examples — gunpowder and paper. I said I was a San Franciscan, and we invented blue jeans. Did that mean they — East Coast private school students — couldn’t wear blue jeans? I said we were in Peru, and the tomato came from Peru. Did that mean that Italians had to stop using tomatoes? That they had to stop eating pizza? Then one of the students said: “Does that mean that blackface is OK?” I said “No, not normally — but is it OK for black people to wear blackface?” “The student, sounding outraged, said “Black people don’t wear blackface!” I said “In South Africa, they absolutely do. The so-called colored people in Cape Town have a festival every year called the Coon Carnival* where they wear blackface, play Dixieland music and wear striped jackets. It started when a minstrel show came to South Africa in the early 1900’s. Americans who visit South Africa tell them they’re offended they shouldn’t do it, and they answer ‘Buzz off. This is our culture now. Don’t come here from America and tell us what to do.’ So what do you say to them? Is it up to you, a white American, to tell black South Africans what is and isn’t their culture?”

*(Since writing that email, I’ve learned from YouTube that the event has been renamed the Minstrel Carnival and, while face paint is common, blackface is rarer.)

McNeil adds:

Since this episode began, I have been willing to apologize for any actual offense I’d given — but not to agree to the Beast’s characterization of me, which I felt made me sound like a drunken racist roaring around Peru insulting everyone in sight.

If the Times had not panicked and I had been allowed to send some version of that, perhaps the Beast would have rewritten or even spiked its story. Almost undoubtedly, the reaction inside the Times itself would have been different.

The news broke, but McNeil says he didn’t realize how seriously the Times senior management took the allegations.

Top management had met by Zoom with black reporters. There were department-by-department Zoom meetings about it. Slack channels were aflame, which I didn’t know because I avoid Slack unless I’m forced to use it.

Racially centered Zoom meetings, and department-by-department Zoom meetings, because of these piddly allegations — allegations the Times had already investigated in 2019, and cleared McNeil of wrongdoing! Who would want to work in a snake pit like that? Want to move somebody out of a coveted slot, and your target is vulnerable because of race, age, sex, or some combination thereof? Just make an accusation, or put someone else up to it.

More:

On Monday, February 1 — by coincidence, my birthday — Dean [Baquet] and Carolyn Ryan called me at about 10:30 A.M.

My notes of the conversation are sparser than I normally take, but I also recounted it right afterward to a friend, so I think this is accurate.

As I remember it, Dean started off by saying “Donald, you had a great year — you really owned the story of the pandemic….”

As soon as I realized he was talking in the past tense, I became tense and started taking notes.

“Donald, I know you,” he went on. “I know you’re not a racist. We’re going ahead with your Pulitzer. We’re writing to the board telling them we looked into this two years ago.”

“But Donald, you’ve lost the newsroom. People are hurt. People are saying they won’t work with you because you didn’t apologize.”

“I did write an apology,” I said. “I sent it to you Friday night. I sent another paragraph on Saturday morning. Didn’t you get it?”

Dean didn’t answer.

“I saw it,” Carolyn said.

“But Donald,” Dean said, “you’ve lost the newsroom. A lot of your colleagues are hurt. A lot of them won’t work with you. Thank you for writing the apology. But we’d like you to consider adding to it that you’re leaving.”

“WHAT?” I said loudly. “ARE YOU KIDDING? You want me to leave after 40-plus years? Over this? You know this is bullshit. You know you looked into it and I didn’t do the things they said I did, I wasn’t some crazy racist, I was just answering the kids’ questions.”

“Donald, you’ve lost the newsroom. People won’t work with you.”

“What are you talking about?” I said. “Since when do we get to choose who we work with?”

“Donald, you’ve had a great year, you’re still up for a Pulitzer.”

“And I’m supposed to what — call in to the ceremony from my retirement home?”

Carolyn stepped in: “Donald, there are other complaints that you made people uncomfortable. X, Y and Z.”

I remember looking at the snow in my garden.

“May I know exactly what X, Y and Z are? And who said I did X, Y and Z? I’m happy to answer anything — but I have to know what I’m being accused of.”

Neither of them responded. To me, it felt like an attempt to intimidate me.

“Let me give you an alternative view of who’s ‘lost the newsroom,’” I said. “I’ve been getting emails and calls from bureaus all over the world saying, “Hang in there, you’re getting screwed.” People are outraged at how I’m being trashed in the press and by the Times. If you fire me over this, you’re going to lose everybody over age 40 at the paper, all the grownups. All your bureau chiefs, all your Washington reporters, all your Pulitzer winners. Especially once they realize how innocuous what I really said was and that you didn’t find it a firing offense in 2019. And they’ll talk to every media columnist in town. The right wing will have a field day.”

“We’re not firing you,” Dean said. “We’re asking you to consider resigning.”

“You’re twisting my arm.”

“We’re not twisting your arm.”

“Just mentioning it, just bringing it up, is twisting my arm. Nobody in 45 years has suggested I resign. Charlotte has threatened to fire me a couple of times, but that’s different. That was always bullshit. But nobody’s ever suggested I resign. I should shut up and get a lawyer. I need a lawyer.”

Dean and Carolyn seemed to pretend to not hear that, either.

“We’re not twisting your arm. We’re asking you to consider it.”

“No. I’m not considering it. I’m not just quitting like this.”

The conversation then trailed to an end, with them saying “consider it” and me saying no.

Here’s Part 3, covering the paper’s investigation of the 2019 Peru trip allegations. 

From an e-mail McNeil says he sent to the friend who recruits Times reporters for these voyages serving as experts:

You should warn anyone you recruit that the Times will treat any crazy allegation — even one by a 15-year-old — as a possibly fireable offense.

I used to love working here. Now I’m so discouraged. Such a mean, spiteful, vengeful place where everyone is looking over his/her shoulder. Even Al Siegal — Mr. Critical — had a sense of humor and balance.

Folks this is why we all need to pay attention to what happens at the Times. Because the Woke have the power to destroy people’s careers, they will destroy the workplace. This man, McNeil, had been at that newspaper for his entire career, and had reported for them from all over the world. None of that mattered. They sold him out because he’s an old white man, and though none of his privileged prep school accusers are black, some NYT employees of color were now refusing to work with him. Over mere accusations.

Here’s a part from the meeting between McNeil and the NYT lawyer (who has two strong potential conflicts of interest, according to evidence presented by McNeil):

Charlotte: “Did you say something about picking up the white mans’ burden?”

Me: “Yes. And a student got upset. But I explained it to her. I was quoting Kipling. I’m not sure the student had ever heard of Kipling.” [I’ll explain this in the next section.]

More:

Charlotte: “OK, let’s move on. Did you insult a shaman?”

“No. I didn’t insult anybody. Which shaman? There were two shamans, an Amazonian one and an Incan one. Do you know which one they mean?”

“Did you insult or make fun of either of them?”

“No! I actually really respected the Amazonian one. He knew a lot about herbs. I interviewed him afterward, and I took notes and took his picture and asked him if I could quote him in the paper some day. He seemed very happy about it. The other one, I didn’t take so seriously. He seemed like kind of a rent-a-shaman for tourists. He did a ceremony for us, but he also came back to the hotel to sell souvenirs.”

“Did you generally say disrespectful things about shamans?”

“Well, yes and no. I thought there was too much focus on shamans and alternative medicine and herbs and stuff like that on the trip. This trip is supposed to be about rural health — that’s why I’m the expert. But this year’s trip was different from last year’s. There was a lot of focus on shamanism, and local plants and customs… Look, I’m not completely dismissive of this stuff. I’ve interviewed shamans and witch doctors and sangomas and nyangas or whatever you want to call local healers. I’ve spent the night in a sangoma’s hut talking about AIDS. They often know a lot of plant medicine, and they understand the psychology of their patients, and a lot of what they do is about treating beliefs — many rural people in Africa and Latin America think disease is caused by curses, not germs, and witch doctors lift curses. But Westerners romanticize that stuff, and these kids definitely did. Some of it’s helpful and some of it’s harmless and some of it’s dangerous. For example — and I talked to them about this — it used to be the tradition in Peru that, when a baby was born and you cut the umbilical cord, you put a lump of dung on the stump. Llama dung or goat dung or whatever. Well, that kills a lot of babies from tetanus. I know a doctor from Cornell who told me it was one of the leading causes of neonatal mortality in Peru. That’s one of the reasons the Peruvian government actually fines women who don’t travel to government clinics to give birth. Now, that sounds really brutal to American kids who think home birth is this cool, wonderful thing — but it saves lives. So, yeah, I did not show total respect for local traditions. Because some of them kill babies.”

“And I also had a discussion on the bus in front of the students with one of the leaders, who was a grad student in plant biology. He was really into ayahuasca, which is this psychedelic brew they drink in the Amazon. He wanted to do a study giving it to people, and I was going ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa, that’s not how you do a clinical trial. You can’t just brew up a batch of psychoactive herbs and give it to people — you’re going to get people flipping out, you might get suicides. That’s totally unethical. You have to figure out what the active ingredients are, and give them to people under controlled circumstances, and have a placebo group.’ So I’m sure I came across as the old fuddy-duddy defending Western medicine. So sue me. But that’s how I feel. That’s what I was there for — to talk about real medicine, not shamanism.”

Charlotte: “Did you sing a Boy Scout song during a shaman ceremony?”

“What??? Did I sing a Boy Scout song? No, I don’t think so. What Boy Scout song?”

“I don’t know.”

“Um…. I don’t know what to say.”

I thought for a minute.

“Was it “I Wear My Pink Pajamas in the Summer When It’s Hot?”

“I don’t know. Did you sing that?”

“No, I don’t think I sang that. I can’t think of any reason I would have sung it. Was it “The Monkey He Got Drunk?” I don’t think I sang that one either. But those are the only two songs I can remember from Boy Scout camp. I mean, I sang them to my kids, but I didn’t sing them on this trip.”

“I don’t know.”

“OK, sorry. I don’t know either.”

This is the level to which the storied New York Times allows itself to be degraded and intimidated by newsroom mobs. This is the level to which they push around a worker who has given four decades of his life to the place, and whose work has been so good this past year they were going to nominate him for a Pulitzer.

You’ll want to read all of Part 4 as well. Like I said, the general outlines of the case we already know, but the details he fills in are damning about the Times newsroom, which sounds like a sick and twisted place to work. The Times’s internal inquisitor asked this old man McNeil if he had made fun of a student’s town — this, after one of the teenage mean girls interpreted his and a Boston student’s joke-teasing each other about the Yankees/Red Sox rival.  If a reporter refused to work alongside another reporter facing these penny-ante accusations, that first reporter ought to be fired for insubordination. But as we see time and time again, the Times‘ leadership is too terrified of the newsroom to stand by expendable old white men like McNeil, the Pulitzer nominee pushed out because a bunch of posh progressive schoolgirls threw a hissy fit.

If I worked for the Times and hoped not to be involuntarily severed from its employ, I would ask for a transfer to the farthest bureau away from the home office as I could stand, and I would limit my interactions with my co-workers as strictly as possible, and I would never take initiative in the office, because the quieter I am, maybe the less they would notice me, and the less at risk I would be that a false accusation of Wokeness heresy would destroy my career.

On second thought, who would want to stay at a company like that?

UPDATE:

The Donald McNeil NYT dustup and the Smith story from last week share two things: the language of a moral panic around race being used to perpetuate class hierarchy, and adults who should know better ceding moral leadership to children who should not be expected to know anything.

— Batya Ungar-Sargon (@bungarsargon) March 1, 2021

UPDATE.2: A reader writes:

Thanks for your posting on McNeil.

I read all 4 Parts with growing anger — not just at the New York Times, but also at the ambushing of McNeil by the “posh progressive school girls” who “threw a hissy fit” as you put it.

In reading McNeil’s postings, I noticed that one of the prime prep school girls went to Andover [Phillips Academy, in Andover, MA].

I was quite upset at her uncritical, arrogant, unthinking political brainwashing. What the hell are they teaching at Andover?

So?

I am graduate of Andover (about the same time Bill Belichick graduated!) and have always been grateful for my years there, the outstanding faculty, my fellow students, and the superb education
that followed me to a top University, multiple graduate degrees, a career in the military, a PhD, and almost two decades of teaching Political Science and International Relations.

It was tough, and a significant financial burden on my parents.

I have NEVER been ashamed or embarrassed about my Andover education or about the school. I have been immensely proud of MY prep school.

Until now.

Why would I give this Woke Fortress any support to further the ongoing destruction of our institutions? I shall not.

The post Donald McNeil Tells His Side appeared first on The American Conservative.

Learning From Crazy Jerry Hanel

A reader writes:

I don’t know if you watch the Investigation Discovery television show Fear Thy Neighbor. If you don’t, I highly recommend it, alongside its spin-off, Fear Thy Roommate. The show explores real-life instances of neighbor disputes that have deadly consequences. It’s a fascinating look at how conflict erupts and both how easily people mismanage such situations and how conflict resolution is so difficult, especially in a society such as ours.

Anyway, a new season just started a few nights ago and I watched the premiere via on-demand earlier today. It concerns the case of a man named Jerry “Jarda” Hanel, who, on January 18, 2020, killed the woman he lived with in a house in Honolulu, severely wounded another residing in the same house, killed two police officers who responded to the incident, then set his house ablaze while still inside of it, cooking off firearm ammunition he had inside, thereby preventing firefighters from putting out the blaze. Ultimately, it destroyed seven homes.

You can read more about this horrific incident (which, strangely, went unnoticed on the Mainland) here and here.

The reason I bring this story to your attention is that the episode shed more light on who Jerry “Yarda” Hanel was. His name is an Anglicized version of his real name, Jaroslav, and he is a native of Communist Czechoslovakia. He served in their military and, eventually, turned himself over to West German authorities and requested asylum in the United States. According to this report, Hanel was living in America by 1985. Eventually, he ended up living in Honolulu with a woman, Lois Cain, who kindly permitted him to reside rent-free in her home in exchange for taking care of all the maintenance and upkeep on the property.

What struck me about this story is how his life in Czechoslovakia and his escape to freedom appears to have affected him. For one, he doesn’t like having pictures taken of him. A lot of us don’t, but it makes more sense in Hanel’s case because he spent so much of his life living in fear and the fact he escaped made him, at least for a time, a potential target of reprisal.

In fact, his paranoia was so powerful that it not only remained almost 30 years following the end of the Cold War, it manifested in bizarre ways. The tragic events of January 18, 2020 were the culmination of years of him harassing both neighbors and random tourists because he believed they were spying on him, calling them “KGB.” In an odd reversal of roles, Hanel went from being the victim of a totalitarian system to being the perpetrator of a totalitarian system in a residential Honolulu neighborhood – he installs cameras all around his house, spending days monitoring his neighbors and others he spots in the vicinity. When he goes outside, he wears Go-Pro cameras, all the while menacing everyone around him.

The whole time I was watching, I kept thinking of your book, Live Not By Lies. After watching the episode, I did some research on Hanel, and lo and behold, I came across this bit from his former attorney:

He thought the secret service and government were tapping his phones; would come into his house and tap him. That kind of thing. He didn’t have cell phones for that reason. He was a little bit of a weird guy, but you would never would expect he’d do what he did today.

What Jaroslav Hanel did that day was unforgiveable. I’m glad he’s dead, because not only was he tortured soul, but he was clearly a menace to society and it’s a shame he had to take so many lives and livelihoods with him. But, at the same time, his story is the ultimate cautionary tale. You mentioned a woman in your book residing in Eastern Europe who didn’t own a smartphone for the exact same reason Hanel didn’t own a cell phone. Neither she nor Hanel are the only people, including in America, who live like this. I know a few of them personally.

Imagine being so traumatized from living under a totalitarianism that you spend your whole life, even in freedom looking over your shoulder. Or thinking you’re constantly being watched to the point you’d deny yourself a convenience that’s made life easier for millions. We in the West consider this flat-out paranoia and totally irrational and we might be right. But, for a country that’s so worried about mental health (especially these days) and exalts victimhood, you’d think Americans and Westerners would be a little more understanding why those of the former Communist-bloc countries are the way they are and why we really need to be more alert to the possibility of totalitarianism arriving in our own societies. The damage that it causes goes far beyond economics and politics, because, as folks like Hannah Arendt point out, the aim of totalitarianism isn’t just to control your actions, but your mind. This is what makes it so lethal.

That damage is also irreversible. How can you trust people when everyone really is out to get your or turn you in? How can you trust the authorities when their goal is to destroy your life once you end up in their crosshairs? We’re constantly told that we need to shut up and listen to the experiences of people who’ve experienced racism, sexism, and everything else the Left puts up a fight over. To that, I say, fine, but we should also shut up and listen to those who’ve lived under Communism, socialism, totalitarianism, and, yes, even cancel culture. To quote a line from the movie Blade Runner, “Quite an experience to live in fear, isn’t it? That’s what it is to be a slave.”

Yet, they don’t want to shut up and listen. Instead, the Left flirts with totalitarianism every day, even though they, given their concern for the oppressed and victimhood, should be most worried of all. Totalitarianism produces victims like Jaroslav Hanel, who in turn, unleashes his demons onto the rest of us.

I wonder if we who grew up in a time and in a culture when you did not have to worry that the slightest slip of the tongue around the wrong person could end up with your livelihood destroyed and your reputation wrecked will be able to explain to the young how free we were…

The post Learning From Crazy Jerry Hanel appeared first on The American Conservative.

What’s Going On At Daily Dreher

A digest of what’s been going on at my Substack newsletter since last I told you about it:

Thoughts about ‘Fatima’ — The Movie & The Event

The other night I watched on Netflix the 2020 drama Fatima. It’s based on the 1917 apparitions of the Virgin Mary to three peasant children in the Portuguese village. The apparitions meant a lot to me when I was Catholic. As an Orthodox Christian, I don’t know what to think of them. It is clear that something supernatural happened — the 70,000 people who were there to witness the final apparition on October 13, 1917, all saw signs and wonders — but what does it mean? As a Catholic, I accepted it, and my wife and I made a pilgrimage to Fatima as part of our 1997 honeymoon. As an Orthodox Christian, the Fatima messages contain religious claims that I cannot accept. Again, I don’t know how to regard them now.

I watched the movie to see how the filmmakers treated the material. It’s a simple story: three shepherd children claimed to receive messages from the Virgin, who appeared regularly to them, once a month, for six months. Their claims were initially disbelieved by the church and certainly by officials of the anti-clerical government. The children were pressed very hard by authorities, but never varied their story. On the date of the final apparition, 70,000 people gathered, including atheist scoffers, and all saw spectacular solar phenomena. One of the skeptics, a prominent atheist newspaper editor from Lisbon, published a full testimony detailing what he saw.

All of that is in the movie, but what makes it stand out is the human side of the event. The mother of Lucia, the prime visionary, is often angry with her daughter for the trouble the child’s visions bring to the family. I laughed out loud at the rosary-hawkers making their way through the Fatima crowds. When my wife and I arrived in Fatima by bus on a gray, drizzly January day, we had to walk down the main street in the village to get to the basilica. It was a grotesque display of vulgar capitalism: shop after shop with glow-in-the-dark Madonnas in the window, kitschy pious junk, Fatiburger, the John Paul II Snack Bar, etc. It inspired revulsion, a real moneychangers-in-the-temple feeling in us.

But then we finally arrived at the vast plaza outside the basilica, shown here in this drone photo:

 

And we saw so many people walking on their knees, across the wet pavement, towards the church, their hands clasped in prayer. In front of us passed a family: a husband holding a baby, his mother (or mother-in-law), and his wife on her knees, moving forward slowly. It seemed to us that they were thanking the Virgin for her prayers in helping them have this baby. I felt ashamed for having passed such harsh judgment on the kitsch, bearing in mind that the people who were humble enough to approach the basilica on their knees were probably the same people who would buy that junky stuff to mark their visit. I had no doubt whose hearts were more pleasing to God.

Watching the movie the other night made me think of how stressful those events must have been for everyone involved — the children, their parents, the parish priest, and the hostile anticlericalist officials. I’m not sure how many of the details were pulled from the historical record, but there’s one scene in which Lucia’s farmer father discovers that apparition-seekers have trampled the field where his family’s crops are growing. They don’t give it a second thought; they are there to see the Mother of God. But Lucia’s father has to think about it, because this is how he feeds his family. The gift of the Holy Virgin’s favor to Lucia comes with real burdens to her family.

I pitied her mother too. Lucia’s mother is very pious, and consumed by anxiety over her son Manuel, who is off fighting in the Great War. You get the feeling that she is doing everything she can to hold herself together during this stressful time, and that the last thing she needs is a daughter who claims that she’s seeing the Virgin Mary. In fact, it’s the mother’s piety that causes her to lash out in anger at her daughter; the woman can’t imagine that the Holy Virgin would condescend to appear to humble country people like them.

Seriously: what would you think if one of your children said that the Virgin Mary was appearing to her? How would you handle the curiosity of the neighbors — both those who wanted your child’s blessing, and those who hated her for her claims? What if you were a priest, and this was happening in your parish? I once knew a Catholic priest who was on the pastoral staff at the Conyers, Georgia, church where a member claimed to have visions of the Virgin throughout the 1990s (visions that were never approved by the Catholic Church). He told me it was a real burden, because so many people were only interested in spiritual fireworks, and didn’t want to talk about about ordinary, meat-and-potatoes Christianity.

This was a bumper sticker you could see at the time:

 

Here in south Louisiana, where I live, in the 1980s, the alleged Marian apparitions at Medjugorje, Yugoslavia, were a big deal for Catholics. Many from here joined the throngs who went to the Bosnian town where six young people claimed to have apparitions of her. I first became aware of them in college at LSU, when a girl I used to see out at the bars came back from summer break as a strictly observant Catholic. Her parents had taken her to Medjugorje that summer, and she had a profound conversion. Later, I became friends with a Louisiana priest who was a passionate proponent of Medjugorje, and who associated himself with a local woman who was not a visionary, but was some sort of mystic who prophesied that a shrine they maintained down the bayou would be a refuge in the coming “Chastisement.”

That priest and the mystic are both dead. The shrine was condemned by the Diocese, and is no longer there, I understand. The things they predicted would happen did not happen.

The priest who married my wife and me in 1997 had been an agnostic before he agreed to go to Medjugorje with his parents. He too had a dramatic conversion, and eventually entered the priesthood. His parents were involved in what he later would describe as a Medjugorje cult, and his father was taken advantage of financially by it. I haven’t spoken to this priest in many years, but I recall that he had grown very skeptical of Medjugorje, though he still acknowledged that many graces had come from there. I haven’t given Medjugorje any thought for a long time, but the Catholic authorities I paid the most attention to had decided that it was likely a hoax (Rome has not yet officially ruled on it one way or the other).

All in all, it seems that the dramatic irruption of the supernatural into the everyday could bring as many problems as blessings. Or at least these happenings are of ambiguous benefit, because they all have to be mediated through the crooked lens of our humanity. One of my favorite stories in the Gospel is the one in which Jesus frees the demoniac chained in the cemetery, exorcising him and sending his demons into a herd of swine. After seeing this possessed man restored to his right mind by this itinerant preacher, did the townspeople give thanks for the man’s deliverance? Of course not! They begged Jesus to go away.

I say that’s one of my favorite stories not because I am encouraged by it, but because it reveals human nature. They had just witnessed a spectacular miracle. They did not want to believe such a thing could happen, because it overturned their understanding of how the world works. All my life I have known people who prefer the pain they know to the possibility of being delivered into a future free of pain. Why would people refuse liberation? Maybe because with freedom comes responsibility. Having seen the miracle Jesus performed in delivering the demoniac, those people couldn’t unsee it. He disrupted the order of their world — and therefore, he must be banished.

It can be hard to understand where those Gadarenes were coming from. What kind of crackpots tell a man who has performed that kind of miracle to hit the road? Wouldn’t you want to know what he has to say about how to live? Well, it’s easier to grasp when you watch a movie like Fatima, and you see how some of the people — Lucia’s mother, most especially — react. Her life was stressful enough without having this crazy thing — a supposed apparition of the Virgin to her child! — added to it. Catholics in Portugal were under a lot of pressure from the secular, anticlerical government. The Fatima film shows that the Church authorities were frightened by the apparition claims at first, in part because they did not want to draw persecution onto the Church. It’s all too human to want things to stay manageable.

I think many people say that if we would only see a miracle, then they would believe in God. It’s not true. It might be true for some, but I think those who are not disposed to believe will always find an explanation for a miracle. Even those who believe it might not be changed by it. I have told many times the story of how a priest and a charismatically gifted woman came to my mom and dad’s house after my dad’s father died in 1994, and we had poltergeist activity at the house. I was down from Washington for my grandfather’s funeral, and experienced it myself. My father saw the gifted woman discern that it was my grandfather’s spirit — she sensed that there was something hot in a closet that she needed; my mom dug and found our only framed photo of my grandfather behind a board there — and that he lingered because he needed my father to forgive him so he could move on. What those strangers didn’t know was that my grandfather had badly broken my dad’s heart in his final years, but that my dad faithfully served him all the same. Now came this priest and a mystic, telling my father that God had allowed his late father to appeal to him for forgiveness — and that my dad had the power to set his father free by saying, “You are forgiven.”

My dad spoke those words. The priest blessed the house, then later said a mass for the peace of my grandfather’s soul. I was a new Catholic at the time, and though I didn’t expect my folks to convert to Catholicism, I thought this would surely bring my dad back to regular churchgoing.

It did not. It didn’t even make him more forgiving, not in the least. Yet all his life, he would testify that what he had seen and experienced that day was true. It wasn’t until very late in his life, in 2015, that he admitted that he too needed to be forgiven by his son (or by anybody). But thanks be to God, he did, and he died in peace. Still, if my dad had taken that extraordinary grace he had been given on that day in 1994 to heart, and let it change his way of seeing the world, how much better would his life had been? Would the brokenness he left behind in the family exist at all? We will never know.

Forgive me, I’m rambling. But listen, I think of the Russian writer in Tarkovsky’s film Nostalghia. He is so lost in his head, and mired in sorrow. In this scene, the writer traverses the nave of a ruined medieval abbey, and we hear a voice — the voice of the Holy Virgin — begging God to reach out to him:

God says that He speaks to the writer, but the writer can’t hear him. God says He reveals Himself to the writer, but the writer has not eyes to see.

This is me. I am someone who believes in miracles and apparitions — not automatically, but I certainly believe they can exist — but I am also someone who is often so caught up in his own head that he can’t perceive the voice or the presence of the Lord in everyday life. I don’t judge my dad for failing to integrate what he saw and heard that day into his life. If I received fully the graces God has given me through seeing miracles and wonders, I would be a saint. I am not a saint, I regret to inform you. And here we perceive the reason for the sorrow of the parish priest in Conyers, who wearied of the people who came seeking God in the extraordinary, but who gave barely a second thought to the fact that they could receive Him in the miracle of the Eucharist.

Here are the first eleven minutes of Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia. Here we see the Russian writer Gorchakov and his Italian translator Eugenia approaching a rural Italian church where a famous painting of the Madonna hangs. Peasant women have the habit of coming to pray before the image, to ask for the Madonna to help them conceive. Gorchakov sourly refuses to go into the church, but Eugenia wants to see the painting. She is beautiful and sophisticated, and really stands out among the modestly clad pious women. A sexton, perhaps, asks her if she’s there to pray for a baby, or to be spared of one. No, she says, she’s just here to look. He tells her that those who want something must be prepared to go on their knees — to sacrifice. Eugenia tries to kneel, but can’t. She lacks faith.

But the faithful experience a miracle. Watch:

This is the consistent message of the movie: if you want to understand, you have to be prepared to sacrifice — your pride, your worldliness, your nostalgia, your idols.

What does that say to me? I wonder. I struggle with this every day. Tarkovsky said that art is not meant to convey ideas, but rather to prepare the soul for death by harrowing it so that the soul is capable of turning to the good. If I do manage to write a book about the re-enchantment of the world, please know that it began with this Tarkovsky movie.

Yeah, I really need to think more deeply and systematically about this new book idea. How do we prepare ourselves to receive the graces of God’s presence? We may never see a bona fide miracle, but God is everywhere present, and fills all things. If we can’t sense him, that is because of our own weakness. Our souls need harrowing so that the seeds of faith planted in them can bear fruit.

My readers have received a lot of my thoughts about Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia, a film that haunts me like nothing else in recent experience.

The Seeker

I tracked down an extraordinary young man I met once in Alaska, who told me about an experience he had recently had in a cave in the Himalayas. Jesus appeared to him. He converted to Orthodox Christianity. I tracked him down because I had stumbled across some things he had written online. Turns out he’s now an ordained Orthodox deacon, husband, and father, living in small-town Washington. From that long interview:

Living with a girlfriend in Eugene, Oregon, he considered himself a devotee of Krishna, but had also found his way into shamanism. One night he and his girlfriend called a local shaman in to bless their house. During the night, they heard their dog barking furiously in the next room. When they woke up, they saw some sort of ghostly creature run from the living room, cross their bedroom, and go through the wall into the next door apartment. Their frightened dog ran into the bedroom with them, and crawled into their bed. Suddenly, they saw a six foot “three-dimensional shadow” standing at the foot of their bed. They covered themselves and the dog with a blanket, in terror. Frangipani began chanting a Hindu prayer, hoping to make the thing go away.

They found out shortly thereafter that their next-door neighbor, who was into a very dark form of shamanism, had a crush on Frangipani’s girlfriend, and had put some sort of curse on them. Their dog was never healthy after that. He kept coughing up some kind of black goo that the vet couldn’t explain. They realized that they would have to put him down out of mercy. They arranged with the shaman to go up on a nearby mountain and ritually strangle the dog, offering it as a sacrifice to make whatever demonic thing had attacked them desist.

(“Wait, you strangled your dog?!” I said.

“Yes. Simon,” he said, in a tone that conveyed, can you believe how insane I was?)

During the sacrificial ceremony, the shaman started chanting om, the most sacred sound in Indian religions (Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism). Back home in Eugene, and sitting on his back patio, Frangipani had a vision. He saw appear before him the om symbol, and looking through it, he saw a representation of the Hindu god Shiva.

 

Om

“That was like the Bat Signal calling me to India,” he recalls.

“I went to India in search of the Source,” he tells me. “I had been summoning different beings through yoga meditation, but I realized after the vision that I was done in America. I wanted to go to a place where they had levitating monks and bleeding statues, to see if it was all real. I broke up with my girlfriend, got rid of everything, and bought a one-way ticket to India, just me and my backpack.

Frangipani made his way to the Dalai Lama’s monastery in Dharamsala, in northeastern India. But even that didn’t satisfy him. Buddhism satisfied him intellectually, but it did not satisfy his heart. He felt that he was at an impasse.

“I looked at the map and said I want to go to the Source, as far as I can in the mountains without going to China,” he says. “I wanted to go to the source of the Ganges. There’s this power there, and I wanted to go to its summit.”

Signposts Of Enchantment

We’ve been talking at length about anthropologist T.M. Luhrmann’s new book How God Becomes Real. One of the things that has to happen for the experience of God to become real to people, Luhrmann writes, is for them to shift their “faith frame” to make experiences of the numinous possible. In other words, you have to believe that these things can happen in order for them to happen. It’s not universally true; people can and do have inexplicable supernatural things happen to them despite being unbelievers prior to the event. Luhrmann is talking about what happens most of the time.

I told my readers that my own faith frame changed many years ago. I began to recall all the supernatural manifestations I have seen in my adult life, and I was struck by how many of them there have been. Here’s one:

There was that time in early 1994 when, after praying the rosary intensely, for weeks, asking for the Holy Virgin to help me decide whether or not to return to Washington, I accepted the job without having received a sign. I went into a bedroom at the country house where I was staying to say a rosary of thanksgiving for what I was sure was her help, and also to ask her to “hold the hand” of my friend K., who was visiting that weekend, and going through a painful divorce. As I prayed the second decade of the Glorious Mysteries, the room filled with sunlight — the only time the sun came out that gray January day — and the aroma of roses. It lasted for that one decade only. When I finished praying, I went upstairs, stunned by the event, and started making up the bed in my bedroom, trying to figure out what had just happened.

K. came in from her walk in the garden, came up the stairs, and burst into my bedroom holding her right hand out to me. “Smell this!” she said, her eyes wide.

Her hand smelled as if she were holding a bouquet of roses.

“Did you wash your hand with floral soap?” I asked.

She shook her head, no.

“Did you use perfume?”

“No. I heard you upstairs and figured you were making up beds, so I came up to help you. I rubbed my nose, and for some reason my hand smells like roses!”

I told her what I had prayed for her while she was out in the garden. And I told her what had happened to me. She dropped her hand. Her mouth fell open. Then the aroma of roses went away.

(She later moved to California, remarried happily, and became the mother of two beautiful children.)

Readers Write

My Substack newsletter focuses not on the news, and on culture war stuff, but on religion, spirituality, and other aspects of life, all written with an eye towards finding things that give us hope and purpose. A reader wrote last week to say these discussions have been helping him:

I used to live in an enchanted world. Over the course of a couple of years, some bad things happened to me, I made some bad decisions, and the end result was that I cut myself off from my capacity for enchantment. I could tell the stories if you’re interested, but they would be very boring to anyone who is not me.

Now, five years after that period, a part of me that I thought was long dead is waking up. Your newsletter and the stories you share in it are a big part of that. Other things have contributed to this awakening as well. Maybe God is bringing these healthy influences into my life to lead me back to Him?

I had a strange experience this morning after reading today’s edition. Instead of going about my usual morning routine, something prompted me to write in my journal. I wrote about how I despaired of returning to the enchanted world in which I grew up and about which you have written at length over the past few months. I thought that I had destroyed the faculties that I once possessed for perceiving this world and engaging with it.

Over the course of the next hour, though, even as I wrote about being cut off from the spiritual, I felt the old sensations I had once experienced returning to my body, as vivid as they had ever been, if not more so. I was aware that the spiritual part of my being was not dead. I had silenced it because it was in pain. “How can you expect me to show you the glory of God in the beauty of a sunrise if my leg is caught in a bear trap?”, it seemed to say. I had grown tired of my soul’s wounded scream, so I silenced it.

It seems like part of me, my Christian soul, if you will, has been living in hell. This morning, it told me what its hell has been like. This part of me wanted to die, to dissolve and escape the pain, but it couldn’t. It wanted to run or fight the source of its pain, but it couldn’t do that, either. I was preventing it from doing so. It was trapped, helpless and suffering, in a kind of living death. Scary stuff. I almost screamed at the top of my lungs in the shower, but I managed to keep the scream an internal one so that I didn’t freak my wife out too much. (I kind of want to go to a lonely open area at night and let out a roar like a wounded lion to get this out of my system). Did I see anything float across the room or hear disembodied voices? No, but I felt like I was connected to something more than myself nonetheless.

Anyway, I’m no longer having an intense spiritual experience, but things are looking up. Keep the newsletters coming and please write your book!

The book to which he refers is a book I’m contemplating doing about the ways we can learn to see the world through the eyes of enchantment — that is, to perceive the presence of God everywhere, filling all things.

Click here for subscription options to Daily Dreher. It’s five dollars a month for an issue each weekday, or $50 per year. If you want to be really nice and support this old boy’s work, you can become a Founding Member for $300 per year.

Oh, and you get more pictures of Roscoe, here expressing his “I’m never trusting you people again” sentiment after coming home last week from a day at the vet, who had to pull two teeth:

 

The post What’s Going On At Daily Dreher appeared first on The American Conservative.

Cancelling Dr. Seuss

This is not funny anymore. These berserkers are like Maoist Red Guards:

I get it. You grew up on Dr. Seuss. I did too! It’s probably safe to assume that most people did and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. But we have to recognize that two things can be true at the same time:

Dr. Seuss is a prolific children’s book author and global icon. And Dr. Seuss has a history of racial baggage that educators should understand when introducing his writing to their students.

If you’re thinking you need to burn your favorite copy of The Sneetches or The Cat in the Hat Comes Back, I’d really rather that you didn’t—we’re all about environmental safety here. If you’re thinking you need to have some important conversations with your students? You’re absolutely right.

Gosh, Social Justice Warrior, how bad is Dr. Seuss’s racism?

It’s actually pretty bad. The researchers behind this study set out to address “a gap in Seuss literature by revealing how racism spans across the entire Seuss collection.” Responding to the idea that Geisel was simply a product of his time, they disagree. “[N]ot all White people ‘of his time’ engaged in overt racism or used their platforms to disseminate racist narratives and images nationally and globally, as he did,” they argue. “There are White people throughout history, and of his generation, who actively resisted racism and risked their lives and careers to stand up against it.”

Their main focus, however, is pushing back against the idea that his children’s books are free from bigotry. The researchers surveyed 50 Dr. Seuss books and concluded that, “of the 2,240 (identified) human characters, there are forty-five characters of color representing 2% of the total number of human characters.” Of the 45 characters, 43 exhibited behaviors and appearances that align with harmful and stereotypical Orientalist tropes. The remaining two human characters “are identified in the text as ‘African’ and both align with the theme of anti-Blackness.” It’s also important to note that each of the non-white characters is male and that they are all “presented in subservient, exotified, or dehumanized roles,” especially in their relation to white characters.

But what about the Sneetches? Turns out that they’re not human, but they’re still RACIST!

In light of this new information, you may wonder about Dr. Seuss books featuring non-human characters. At Teaching Tolerance, we’ve even featured anti-racist activities built around the Dr. Seuss book The Sneetches. But when we re-evaluated, we found that the story is actually not as “anti-racist” as we once thought. And it has some pretty intricate layers you and your students might consider, too.

The solution to the story’s conflict is that the Plain-Belly Sneetches and Star-Bellied Sneetches simply get confused as to who is oppressed. As a result, they accept one another. This message of “acceptance” does not acknowledge structural power imbalances. It doesn’t address the idea that historical narratives impact present-day power structures. And instead of encouraging young readers to recognize and take action against injustice, the story promotes a race-neutral approach.

This message of “acceptance” does not acknowledge structural power imbalances.

These people really are monsters, and I’m not kidding. The outfit is called “Learning For Justice” — it was “Teaching For Tolerance,” but tolerance, they explain, was too mushy. It is a project of the Southern Poverty Law Center, and has some influential partners.

How do you know if your kids are getting this garbage taught to them in their schools? Shouldn’t you check? What kind of sicko ruins a kid’s childhood by teaching her that the Sneetches are racist? What kind of monster tells kids that acceptance of others is wicked because it might make people care for each other across social divides?

See, this is why I say it’s not funny. There’s a malicious Marxist message here. These progressives are preparing the country for class war and race war, and maybe even civil war.

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View From Your Table

Orthodox Christians are preparing for our Lent, which begins on March 15. We just had a fast-free week. My priest here in Baton Rouge is a Texan who observed the rare fast-free Friday yesterday by smoking a brisket (I think this is a ritual with male Texans). It is a think of beauty, is it not?

UPDATE: My daughter Nora made chocolate chip sheet pancakes, and ate her breakfast outside with her hens.

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